There are Kurdish Communist militias, but there are still many reasons for America to promote Kurdish interests. Additionally, there are reasons to help stamp out ISIS and navigate the other players in the region as well…leaving the Kurds to their own fate. I think this helps explain current American policy in the region:

‘Whatever you think of the “libertarian socialism” of Syrian Kurdistan, it’s not even in the same time zone as the medieval totalitarianism of ISIS, the secular nationalist tyranny of Assad’s Arab Socialist Baath Party regime in Damascus or the Putin-esque rule of the neo-Ottoman Erdogan.

Turkey can call the Kurds terrorists all they want, but that will not make them so.’

Meanwhile, an increasingly authoritarian, populist, Islamic Erdogan has launched a campaign into Syria to battle with Kurdish forces:

Turkish army says 7 of its soldiers were killed on Saturday, 5 of them when their tank came under attack near Syria’s Afrin.

The total death toll for Turkish troops since the operation started on Jan. 20 now stands at 13, it said.

In his book Where The West Ends, Totten describes visiting Northern Iraq briefly as a tourist with a friend, and the general feeling of pro-Americanism in Kurdish Northern Iraq that generally one can only feel in Poland, parts of the former Yugoslavia etc.

Domestic Politics And The Tendency People Have To Seek Transcendence And Naked Self-Interest At The Very Same Time:

Beware offering thoughtful critique of the sacred ‘-Isms’ these days (feminism, environmentalism, racism, sexism), even if it’s just pointing out other ways of thinking about injustice. God forbid should you hold a conservative position on any matter. Problems come with identity politics and political idealism, after all, just as they do with religious belief and certainty and fixed conservative positions. Generally, such criticism is not welcomed among radically activated and/or ambitious individuals.

If someone doesn’t recognize the moral legitimacy of the rules governing an institution they claim is oppressing them, maybe you want to ask which rules they recognize as morally legitimate before they go end-up controlling the institution?

Civility and a boring politics aren’t desireable for many, for various reasons, especially those people bringing presumed moral goods for everybody through radical change and radical liberation.

It might be useful to try and hold a mirror to many ambitious people in high towers and positions of authority in addition to one’s Self; a perplexing exercise during a time of The Self and a rather compromised politics of celebrity.

There are a lot of decent people out there, and a lot of good in people, of course, away from the madding crowd.

The Church Of Holy Modern Human Progress Shall Be Built!

The Old Catholic Church Shall Soon Be Rebuilt!

“Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.”

On that note, Theodore Dalrymple (Anthony Daniels) takes a look at war photographers to highlight an underlying truth: Where there’s courage there is also cowardice. Where there’s moral concern there’s also boredom and self-preservation.

‘That people may love what they hate—or say that they hate—is illustrated in extreme form by war photographers. If you asked war photographers why they risk their lives to take pictures of the most terrible conflicts (rather than, say, of the beauties of nature), they would say that it is to inform or alert the world in the hope of bringing those conflicts to an end. But this is far from the whole truth, psychologically speaking; and as a person who has indulged in a little civil-war tourism myself, I can avow to the fact that there is nothing like a sense of danger for solving, at least temporarily, whatever little troubles are agitating one’s soul. When there might be an ambush round every corner, the minor fluctuations of one’s emotional state are of little concern.’

‘A strong dislike of pretension, accompanied by a happy delight in puncturing it through satire and parody, is also a major element in his literary criticism. His demolition of Ezra Pound is especially effective because, as a classical scholar and linguist, he is able to establish that many of Pound’s most admired technical effects are in reality simple errors of grammar or translation.’

Ha!:

“Those teach who can’t do” runs the dictum,

But for some even that’s out of reach:

They can’t even teach—so they’ve picked ’em

To teach other people to teach.

Then alas for the next generation,

For the pots fairly crackle with thorn.

Where psychology meets education

A terrible bullshit is born.’

Ha!

Many people still can’t handle how bad Communism was on the ground, and fewer these days are looking to keep the ideology up in the air, partly thanks to Conquest and his labors:

What if the Obama administration aimed to take away the leverage propping-up the Revolutionary Guard and the mullahs; clearing the slate of past American financial obligations, thus holding Iran’s leaders much more accountable to their people?

This assumes quite a bit of competence and intent that may not have been present, but if it is a consequence (however intended/unintended), I’d likely support it.

I have been pretty much against the Iran deal, because I’ve been thinking the costs outweigh the benefits: It yields much American/Western leverage against a rotten regime, it puts what I think is a kind of idealistically misplaced faith in ‘international institutions’ (bankrolled by the U.S. taxpayer), and it may keep those controlling Iran (come what may) on the glide-path towards deliverable nukes.

—

The following responses to the below tweet might give some demographic insight into who protested in 2009, and who might be doing doing so now in Iran:

Some factions have gone all in for Civil Rights solidarity because it likely throws them a line in from the West (often wealthier, educated people in the suburbs around Tehran). There are a lot of poorer Iranians with few job prospects, however, who may be fed up with the same old revolutionary rhetoric.

In 2009 almost every person I knew in Iran was somehow involved in the Green Movement and attended at least one of many protests, in Tehran or smaller cities.

These days I can’t find anyone I know personally who has joined #IranProtests. The demography seems to be different.

‘Huntington blames pliant politicians and intellectual elites who uphold diversity as the new prime American value, largely because of their misguided guilt toward victims of alleged oppression. So they encourage multiculturalism over a more traditional American identity, he says, and they embrace free trade and porous borders despite the public’s protectionist preferences. It is an uncanny preview of the battles of 2016. Denouncing multiculturalism as “anti-European civilization,” Huntington calls for a renewed nationalism devoted to preserving and enhancing “those qualities that have defined America since its founding.”

Worth a read, though the comments are sadly predictable (Democracy Dies in Darkness!)

Here is Huntington, before his death, discussing ‘The Clash Of Civilizations:’

“Huntington was instinctively a conservative because he valued an ordered society, but he also championed conservatism as a necessary instrument to defend liberal institutions against communism. In many of his books he attacked idealistic liberals for holding such institutions to impossible, utopian standards that undermined their effectiveness in the world.”

and:

“An iconoclast to the core, Huntington never threw his lot in with left or right. He was too statist to be a libertarian, too realist to embrace neoconservatism, and too sympathetic to nationalism, religion and the military to identify with liberal Democrats. As a conservative Democrat, then, he is an intellectual rarity.”

Rising living costs coupled with endemic corruption/fraud/mismanagement would naturally anger citizens of any nation. But it’s doubly angering when you live in a theocracy that rules from a moral pedestal https://t.co/p884DESGe0

So good of the man to give his take on the relative influence of our nations.

My two cents:

The regime in Iran is not merely Islamic and thus counter, and resistant, to much in Western society for its own reasons (pre and post-Enlightenment), it is ideological and revolutionary. The regime’s got America and ideas of America stuck in its craw; already having elements of Western influence contained within the revolution. The current regime’s expansionism, violence and repression is baked in the cake, to some extent, and helps explain why it aligns with Moscow, Damascus, and even Havana. This makes it really hard to do business with them at all.

This regime is quite authoritarian, repressing other factions within Iranian civilization who disagree, despite the country’s representative mechanisms and procedures. I think former President Ahmadinejad’s Member’s Only jacket could tell us something about his populist appeal to Iranians who mobilize into the Basij (part of the Revolutionary Guard of which Ahmadinejad was a part, and which does a lot of dirty work).

As a Shi’a, more geographically/ethnically homogeneous nation, Iran is involved in a bitter, intra-Islamic war for supremacy within the Muslim world, funding guns, terrorism, drugs and proxies around the region and more broadly whenever it can (Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, Iraq, Argentina, even to Britain and into the heart of free-speech debates within the West with the crass political maneuvering of the Salman Rushdie affair).

The Iranian regime is involved in a lot of black-market activity in order to achieve deliverable nuclear weapons. This could easily start an arms race with the Saudis, Sunni factions and other very unstable regimes and States within the Muslim world. American influence has been greatly diminished, especially in the last decade.

I’ve been asked why I didn’t support the Iran deal (see here), and it’s mostly because I think many factions in the West, including those in power during the Obama administration, didn’t have a good enough moral/political map to understand the risks and the rewards in doing American business with Iran. The logic of ‘this deal or war’ was always flawed. The sanctions that were lifted were, in fact, doing a lot of work. Dealing with deeply anti-American thugs is still dealing with deeply anti-American thugs, and it damned well better be worth the costs.

On that note, allow me to explain a deeper disagreement with the ‘inside every Iranian is an activist waiting to get out‘ approach, and why I am more sympathetic to our current approach under Donald Trump.

To say nothing of the totalitarian impulses and consequences of actual Communist revolution often tolerated beneath liberal sentiment (see many universities), nor the radical and rule-of-law-undermining authoritarian populism of many Western activists (gelling upwards into impossible politically idealistic demands upon our institutions, erosion of the rule of law, and resulting in ideological actors personalizing bureaucracy), this reminds me of a quote from Kelley Ross on the problems even deeper liberal political thinkers have had in providing sufficient moral foundations for liberal political order.

‘Now, I do not regard Berlin’s value pluralism as objectionable or even as wrong, except to the extend that it is irrelevant to the MORAL issue and so proves nothing for or against liberalism. Liberalism will indeed recommend itself if one wishes to have a regime that will respect, within limits, a value pluralism. I have no doubt that respecting a considerable value pluralism in society is a good thing and that a nomocratic regime that, mostly, leaves people alone is morally superior to a teleocratic regime that specifies and engineers the kinds of values that people should have. However, the project of showing that such a regime IS a good thing and IS morally superior is precisely the kind of thing that Gray decided was a failure.

Thus, I believe Gray himself sees clearly enough that a thoroughgoing “value pluralism” would mean that the regime of the Ayatollah Khomeini is just as morally justified as the regime of Thomas Jefferson. Gray prefers liberalism (or its wreckage) for the very same reason that the deconstructionist philosopher Richard Rorty prefers his leftism: it is “ours” and “we” like it better. Why Gray, or Rorty, should think that they speak for the rest of “us” is a good question.’

The above could help explain why the previous administration put a lot of effort in reaching out to our historical enemies (Cuba, Iran) and left many alliances to wither (Israel, arguably Britain). The West must be hard, or softly, remade from the inside-out. The real problem is within the West, after all, and American military, economic and political resources should, at best, be morally justified in including enemies into a ‘community of nations.’

***In all humility, however, there is a seduction of the more personal kind, and a lot of pride, truth, and principle in wanting to see one’s own map of the world extended as far as it will go. I expect a lot of liberal American publications (hip-deep into activist ideology these days) will still invest in the Obama plan or back away from human-rights and push for caution regarding events in Iran, while many on the American right (Constitutional Republicans, neo-conservatives, and the Religious right) will probably more openly support regime change in Iran.

It’s important to remember: The map ain’t always the terrain.

Honestly, I can’t say I disagree too much at the moment with the following:

Many reports of peaceful protests by Iranian citizens fed up with regime’s corruption & its squandering of the nation’s wealth to fund terrorism abroad. Iranian govt should respect their people’s rights, including right to express themselves. The world is watching! #IranProtests

A terrorist blows up a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires (85 dead) in 1994–>Prosecutor Alberto Nisman starts relentlessly investigating years later and eventually confirms evidence of an Iranian state-sponsored Hezbollah agent behind the attack–>Nisman also discovers that the President of Argentina (wonderfully corrupt) is involved in the cover-up of this fact for politics/money/trade/ideological reasons–>Alberto Nisman is murdered in 2015.

‘On July 18, 1994, Ibrahim Hussein Berro, an operative of the Iranian-backed Hezbollah, drove a van filled with 606 pounds of ammonium nitrate fertilizer and fuel oil into the Buenos Aires Jewish community center, known as AMIA. More than 300 Argentines were wounded; 85 were murdered. It remains the bloodiest terrorist attack in Argentina’s history.

From 2004 until 2015, our friend, the prosecutor Alberto Nisman, tirelessly pursued the truth behind this crime. He knew from his investigation that the attack was an Iranian-planned operation. And he determined that Ms. Kirchner was behind a cover-up designed to whitewash Iran’s role.

What drove Ms. Kirchner? Argentina faced deep economic problems at the time, and the financial benefits of closer relations with Iran might have tempted her. Her government also had populist ties to Iran and the Bolivarian bloc of nations led by Venezuela. Whatever the reason, never has Ms. Kirchner been formally charged in the crime. Until now.’

This event demonstrates not only how criminally corrupt the Argentine government is (Don’t Cry For Me Argentina), but also the kinds of people, incentives and dangers out there in the world.

The thuggish regime in Iran really is seeking to expand its scope globally (murdering Jews on foreign soil). It really is seeking deliverable nukes while dipping into black-market activity, funding terrorism in a bid to the Mediterranean. It really is seeking supremacy over a quickly forming Saudi-Israeli alliance (Al Quds in Syria, Hezbollah in Lebanon, current ‘allies’ in Yemen).

It will do these kinds of ‘legitimate’ deals where it can too.

During the past administration, a decision was made in Washington to frame American relations with the Iranian regime as either war or a deal to include them in the ‘community of nations’ (perhaps what you might expect from a ‘peace’ activist).

It’s not clear these are the kinds of people with whom we can, nor should, be doing business (though I’m sympathetic to countering Saudi-funded Wahhabism).

Anti-Semitism runs deep, and there are plenty of people to reinforce their own standing/lack of standing by scapegoating Jewish folk. A lot of the time such differences can be explained simply by what happens in the schoolyard (he/she is different, isn’t like me, looks funny etc.) but dear Lord, can such sentiment be theorized into racial and genetic pseudo-science, justified by religious conviction, and mobilized into political violence.

More care is required than to leave freedoms in the hands of identitarians.

‘The danger of governments and the press continuing to deny the reality of violent anti-semitism, and of the real dangers posed by large numbers of migrants from Muslim-majority countries without any real effort or ability to acculturate them to Western social and political norms, while blaming “the far right” and “neo-Nazis” alone for anti-semitism and attacks on Muslims, should be plain to any thinking person.’

‘…Pretentions of Iranian regional hegemonism have altered Arab state calculations at a time when faith in U.S. protection has waned. Especially if Israeli power can be concorded with Sunni Arab efforts to thwart Iran, selling out the Palestinians would be a small price to pay for that benefit, especially if it could be made to look like something other than a sell-out. And here we have the origin of the aforementioned strangeness.’

—

Radical campus chic meets a taste of reality. From the Harvard Crimson, a graduating student reminds of the horrors of Communist ideology, shared from her family’s personal experience:

‘Many in my generation have blurred the reality of communism with the illusion of utopia. I never had that luxury. Growing up, my understanding of communism was personalized; I could see its lasting impact in the faces of my family members telling stories of their past. My perspective toward the ideology is radically different because I know the people who survived it; my relatives continue to wonder about their friends who did not’

All of us, I think, are subtly influenced by not only our own direct experiences, especially while young, but often imperceptibly by those around us, consistently, all throughout our lives; people interested in ideas no less than people who use their hands.

‘Dime con quien andas, y te dire quien eres’ is a common Spanish phrase, and I’d even heard it a few times in actual conversation while there: ‘Tell me the company you keep; I’ll tell you who you are’.

Whatever your moral lights, there is much activism and radicalism claiming liberation, but often coming with dangerous, collectivizing and totalizing elements harbored within, shaping the perceptions of the people and institutions wherein it can be found.

If these are the people and ideas left to defend liberty (people to whom Communism is radically chic), we’ve got serious trouble.

Russia appears a post-ish Communist, revanchist, fairly corrupt petro-State run by a ex-KGB guy. Russian leadership is actively paying individuals, groups and orgs to undermine Western interests and U.S. sovereignty.

If you believe in institutions which promote various conflicting, but often shared, Western-man-on-the-street beliefs in Western secular humanism (democracy promotion, the use of U.S. military force, the use of the U.S. military to preserve liberal world order, expansion of global liberty as residing within individuals, Constitutional and/or Westphalian-style state promotion, working for human rights etc.) then you likely don’t want to see Russian leadership gaining much tactical advantage.

The terrorist-sponsoring, post-1979, expansionist deliverable nuke-seeking gang in Tehran, the clinging, chemical-weapons deploying Assad in Syria, and our ‘friends’ in Moscow all share common interests; undermining U.S. strength and inhibiting Western influence are tops on the list.

Maybe Erdogan, consolidating his power autocratically and riding a deeper wave of Islamic resurgence and sentiment, will keep looking Eastward and continue to play both ends more than he’s doing now.

A lot of moderate political ground is now occupied in the U.S. by people lamenting the major rifts within both U.S. political parties, the celebrification of high office, and the lack of institutional stability, social trust and decently functioning politics. I suspect Trump has become a symptom of, and a lightning rod for, the changes occurring within and without our Republic.

As for the Kurds, well, they have some potential to reflect more of what most Americans would generally like to see out in the world (conveniently found in Israel and in many States having emerged from the Eastern Bloc).

‘The Syrian-Iranian-Hezbollah axis is poised to emerge victorious in the Syria war, stronger than ever, thanks to military assistance from Russia. Assad is surviving the biggest threat to his family’s rule since it seized power four decades ago. Short of political revolutions in Tehran and Moscow, he’s likely to die an old man in office. And he’ll have no incentive whatsoever to change his ways. He’ll continue exporting terrorism all over the region, and the next war between Israel and a now far-stronger Hezbollah will likely make the last one look like a peace process. The Kurds in Syria—our only true friends in that country—are likely to lose everything they have gained without American backing.’

I suppose we’ll see what happens, as the wise Kurdish position appears to be lobbying the hell out of anyone for support while recognizing they’re still on their own, scrambling to survive…

In his book Where The West Ends, Totten describes visiting Northern Iraq briefly as a tourist with a friend, and the general feeling of pro-Americanism in Kurdish Northern Iraq that generally one can only feel in Poland, parts of the former Yugoslavia etc.